Toki the Good Boy
by Spurnine
Summary: A look at Toki's childhood.


Of all things, Toki hated criticism the worst.

Because when he was a Good Boy, there was no shouting, no fists, and no switches; when he was a Good Boy he was fed and allowed to sleep on his cold narrow cot in the house. When he was a Good Boy, there were no dousings with frigid water, no day-long vigils of prayer held without food. They let him wear real clothes, rather than sack-cloth, when he was a Good Boy.

And fat was representative of not only one, but _two_ of the seven deadly sins: both Gluttony and Sloth.

Baths, in the Wartooth household, meant pain for Toki. He could recall, down to the last detail, the stiff line-dried gray towels, the rough wooden tub, still rimed with lint-caked soap from its use as a laundry trough, and the water, always frigid, and turning gray under his body soil, no matter how clean he'd thought he was.

She refused to let him wash himself, his mother. She would force him to sit or stand with wrenching grabs at his arms, and muttered warnings to Stay Still or it would get Worse.

And while she scoured his skin until it pinkened and stung with cold and pain alike, she would pinch up the slight bit of baby-fat at his hips, or the small of his back, or the inside of his thighs.

"You are a filthy little swine. Your father would be disgusted."

She never raised her voice. She never needed to.

Toki would duck his head in shame, and his tears went unnoticed or—worse—she would see, and tip his face back ever so gently, until he was looking into her eyes. Then the slaps came.

The first always took him off his balance, so he stumbled; then she would grab a hank of his hair and hold him still and administer a series of quick cracks, each accompanied by the order to Stop Crying.

Toki remembers his vision swimming pale and blue back into focus on her leaden-hued face, her impassive eyes, the dead slackness of her mouth. How the odor of ammonia and soap made the inside of his nose sting with its acrid stench. Too many times to count she had muttered, "You are bleeding. Wipe your face."—This said after one such session. She turned away and wiped her dampened hands on her apron, wrung the liquid and blood off as though it was filth, as though it burned her hands.

Toki was never touched, except to inflict pain. He was very rarely spoken to, except to be talked down or given orders. He grew accustomed to it, so much so that he would turn away from kindness—a strange concept to him—for familiar contempt, or even cruelty.

The fasting came first, to earn what shreds of praise he could from his parents; occasionally his mother would take away his untouched bowl of gruel and he could imagine a smile on the pursed pale-blue line of her lips.

She didn't call him a fat swine as often when he did not eat as much. But he was weak.

Sometimes, mostly at night when his stomach yawned like a black hole in his belly, he would creep out to the barn and eat raw grain, handful after handful.

But mornings brought guilt, and his parents' cold dull stares seemed to_ see_ how weak he had been, and that selfsame guilt made him first to work obsessively, like a machine, running though all his grueling chores in short hours. Then the guilty urges, unsatisfied, drove him to the fringes of the black forest. There, he could wander amongst the trees in the dead silence of the eternal winter that their village was locked in.

Sometimes in half-hallucinations brought on by hunger and loneliness he saw visions, or dreamed dreams.

Once he lay at the roots of an ancient tree, bulging gray and gnarled as varicose veins from the black-and-frosted soil. He could not recall how he had gotten there; his skin was clammy and his mouth dry. In his ears he could hear this soft, soft buzzing; his heartbeat seemed to force the blood out through all his arteries like meat through a grinder, and as thick. He could feel the pulse dully behind his stomach.

He might have been without food for days.

But he was a Good Boy. He did not indulge in the sin of gluttony, or that of sloth, and so he was a Good Boy. He was a Good Boy. He _was_ a Good Boy.

Wasn't he?


End file.
